Chapter 226: Treasured Islands |
How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, (2nd Era, 1883)
This was an inevitability. When the two met, it had always gone this way; so it was completely predictable that, as these two Knights of the Round saw one another once again, it would come to this.
Bedwyr with his spear, Erec with his axe. This time in a pit.
Erec gave a manic grin, which his brother did not return.
His brother by blood, this time. But more than that, his brother in soul. How many times had they come together in such a way? It almost felt like a homecoming to Erec, although he didn't understand the sensation, given the dissonance of his brother using his spear instead of a sword and the deep, primal understanding that this event was a natural occurrence.
Erec simply accepted this for what it was, knowing that this was how things had always been meant to be.
"Are ye worthy?" Erec asked, throwing a mocking tone into his voice. He felt that second Knight in his soul with those words. And with it, he knew its intention, and thus his.
They were to grasp the other Knight. Test to see if this incarnation was as worthy of being at the table as he was.
Yes, he saw it too. This little challenge was a ritual of being a Knight—of having a seat at the round table. There could be no greater joy than to test your might against another of your kind and push yourselves to your limits.
"Shall we get on with it then?" Erec asked, his axe catching with silver fire as the mantle that had been previously hard to grasp, came in a full instant. He was ready, willing, and there in full force that he'd only glimpsed before. With two of the table reaching for their Mantles at the same time, the air was thinner, and the barrier was easier to cross than before. He looked at the silver fire on his axe, a smile on his face. There was a satisfaction to it being at his beck and call. It had been waiting for this for ages.
"Yes," Bedwyr said.
An agreement, plain and simple. Though it was one word, it spoke of countless centuries of competition, fighting, and jealousy. But they had always regarded each other fondly, each seen as a great warrior, capable of deeds that no other knight could match. Yet Erec wasn't about to let himself be bested by his brother-in-arms. He was the strongest Knight here. The one with the most might, aside from the King himself.
"So be it," Erec replied.
Duel honored and accepted.
Erec launched forward with a burst of silver flame like a jet beneath his feet—he sent an overhead chop directly at Bedwyr. Slicing downward with an inferno of flame in an arc, the very air scorched around him, dried and tormented by the hell that was the heat from the attack.
It crashed, searing the pit and melting sand as it cleaved a straight line toward Bedwyr; the collateral damage he wrought to the world did not matter.
The silver flames concealed the scene before him for the briefest minute. It was hard not to when bringing down an inferno upon his enemy's head, but once it cleared, he could see the damage. Everywhere it hit, it carved into the rock and dug it out for a solid five feet.
Deep in the crack now wrought into the pit was Bedwyr. His spear and he were coated in rock, like a second skin. The gravel itself was crawling toward him, infusing his second skin with an earthly might. They grew further into a towering form; the spear in his hand went through a similar change, though not of stone. The oblong steel weapon grew longer as he towered in rapid succession…
In a minute, he'd grown to the size of a building.
Erec stepped away with a plume of silver fire as that giant reared its hand back and snapped the spear forward where he had been, carving through the landscape and wrecking everything near them.
There was a scream from their bystanders.
The Knights paused, both of their eyes going to the crowd, as Erec stood before the giant form of the rock behemoth that Bedwyr had become.
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"Thou must leave," Erec yelled, his voice radiating outward with a divine authority. This wasn't a place for his friends. This wasn't a fight they needed to witness. In fact, this wasn't a fight for anyone to witness, aside from the two knights whose honor and brotherhood were at stake. For this was a duel of honor. A duel that would validate the current wielders of their mantles.
Both of them waited. Their eyes turned towards Garin, Gwen, and Colin, as both radiated that authority bequeathed to them by the Round Table. It was a command to be obeyed.
— - ☢ - — - ☼ - — - ☢ - —
Colin stared at those representations of might before him. The silver fire wasn't new. He'd seen that before wielded by his friend. It had been a vexing power that Colin couldn't quite understand the source of. Erec had spoken at length about fury being a natural source of it. Still, Colin hadn't been able to make heads or tails of it whenever he got into this state, when that silver fire wrapped him like a shroud, embracing him and granting him an almost divine might.
It wasn't a simple talent. That much Colin had been able to diagnose. It felt like a regal mandate. An employment of power and strength that should be only possible for those granted a divine spark. With it, his friend was capable of feats that no one at their level should be, even with that annoying ability that Erec had, which pumped his strength to an otherwise unobtainable level.
He felt it now in the way that those stones wrapped around Bedwyr had been able to block that silver fire, which he had seen cleave through things that it shouldn't have been capable of.
It also extended to the way that Bedwyr effortlessly manipulated the earth around it, as if it were a being simply crafted and birthed from the caverns below. This, too, felt like an unnatural power, an extension of which Colin, who had his own depths of research into mysticism, hadn't seen a glimpse of.
There was a simple principle with mysticism. Despite how you formed glyphs, despite where you drew your lines, everything that you did regarding magic had an associated cost. For a simple mysticism glyph, that cost was the investment of mana it took in order to conjure and execute it. The glyph essentially was a set of instructions that shaped and then spurred the mana into action.
What he looked at in front of him, as these two wielded around might and magic in a way that should not have been possible, was a seeming absence of that cost.
Unless their level of development of virtues was around what it should have been, on par with a Master Knight or a Commander Knight, this level of power effortlessly thrown around should have been far more taxing and straining.
More frustratingly, they acted as if it was nothing, sitting there maintaining the illogical power and facing down one another with a casual abuse of such powers.
Arrogant.
Yet, as they stood there maintaining it, looking at the rest of them and telling them to leave, Colin felt his pride flare and his ego bruise. How dare they tell him that he should go? And the way they said it, too, as if they had a right to rule over everything around them, as if they were royalty.
Colin snorted. "You two are getting airs," he said, feeling his electricity spark. It felt like a jolt in his veins as he looked at these two. Their presence, the sheer intoxication of the power and air around him as he activated his golden eyes and saw that the source of mana seemed to leech into these two like a funnel from nowhere.
Vexing, irritating, unexplainable, and supremely annoying. Such capabilities shouldn't be possible for these two, yet they were casually flexing around a might that would rival a god's. This inexplicable pattern of mana simply conforming and appearing made absolutely no sense. And it was more than mana, too. He sensed it. His depths knew, and an electric surge within him knew as he looked at them that something more than mana was going on. It was as if mana was being converted from something and then transformed into something else. Where it came from was impossible to say.
"Just what are you doing?" Colin yelled down there, feeling Garin yank at his arm, trying to drag him away from the upcoming fight.
"Colin, we should go," Garin reinforced.
"We will not be leaving," Colin said, irritated beyond belief that these two had the audacity to give orders to him. To think that they would go so far as to command him around when all he was simply doing was sitting here listening. "I will be staying and watching their battle, if that is what they will do. I'm surprised that you're condemning me for not following their orders when they're going all out in a way that will attract attention."
Colin argued, his eyes roaming around near them. It was a bit of a stretch to claim they were 'drawing attention' when nothing was around for miles, even he had to admit.
This far out in the wasteland, even though they were in the kingdom itself and there were guests, it was unlikely for a fight to escalate to the point where it drew attention. Fights like that had to be on par with grandmasters clashing, a type of battle that Colin had never witnessed, yet only heard stories of. A very limited percentage of the population could muster that much power to attract that kind of attention. As extravagant and unexplainable as what was going on was, it was on a different scale.
Not that it mattered. His point, being that people could simply order him around like they ruled over this world, when really, they were just two brothers fighting in a pit, was ridiculous. "Besides, can't you see something else happening here, Garin? Do you really think it's appropriate to leave him alone, exploring some mysterious power and causing trouble?"
"I think they're going to do it regardless, and this is their warning to get out of the way," Garin replied.
They did seem impatient, sitting there. Glaring at almost all of them. It pissed Colin off even more.
"We will pull back to a safe distance, but I will still watch this fight." Colin insisted, letting Garin pull him away from the pit's edge. The very least, if he was going to comply with these asinine and arbitrary demands, he would watch.
And as his golden eyes took in what was unfolding before him, he would burn it into his memory. There had to be an answer there, somewhere. A way that made it make sense. There hadn't been a mystery to magic yet, that he hadn't been able to find a solution within the vast beauty of the tapestry…
But the machine had given him a clue lately. In the depths of the lab in the cavern. The old-world machine that the tin can had attached himself to had constantly gone over a term called the "scientific method…" and he would begin it here.
His 'hypothesis' was that magic caused this. Now, he just had to get data and figure out how.